Solana Can Now Hide Transaction Amounts: Helius Launches Privacy Rings on Mainnet, Institutional Version to Support Compliance Audits and Whitelists

Author: Helius

Compiled by: TechFlow

TechFlow Introduction: The permanent open transparency of public ledgers has long hindered the mass onboarding of real-world business scenarios such as payroll disbursements, corporate treasuries, and institutional DeFi. Helius officially launches the permissionless privacy layer, Solana Privacy Rings, on the Solana mainnet, pioneering on-chain encryption for asset types and amounts.

The solution leverages concise zero-knowledge proofs to complete verification at millisecond speeds, seamlessly integrating with existing Solana applications and fiat on/off ramps; addressing institutional compliance requirements, Helius also plans to launch Custom Rings supporting independent auditor keys and allowlists, which are currently undergoing audit.

Today, we officially launch Solana Privacy Rings on the mainnet. Rings bring programmable privacy natively into Solana's high-performance execution environment, paving the way for confidential payments, private DeFi, and enterprise-scale adoption.

Starting today, developers can simply call a streamlined API interface to integrate, thereby building confidential swaps, staking, and yield-generating applications with privacy escrow accounts on Solana.

This step also lays the foundation for the enterprise product Custom Rings, enabling financial institutions and large enterprises to autonomously define on-chain compliance rules and audit visibility permissions.

Why We Built Solana Privacy Rings

Solana is the most scalable and battle-tested mainstream public blockchain today. With settlement confirmation speeds at the 150-millisecond level, transaction fees as low as fractions of a cent, and a rapidly growing DeFi ecosystem, Solana is reshaping global financial infrastructure.

But like all public blockchains, Solana fundamentally only offers "pseudonymity." Every transfer, account balance, and wallet association is permanently etched onto an open ledger, allowing anyone to trace back the asset holdings and counterparty records of any address since the genesis block.

This absolute transparency makes it difficult for public chains to meet real-world financial needs such as payroll and daily commercial settlements. To move global finance on-chain, blockchains must possess both scalability and privacy protection capabilities.

Around this goal, we established three core design principles for Solana Privacy Rings:

· Inject native privacy capabilities into Solana;

· Ensure programmable privacy maintains high-throughput scalability;

· Achieve both without ever compromising the end-user experience.

Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz stated: "When people talk about scaling, they often only focus on throughput and latency, ignoring the fact that privacy is the ultimate boundary of scaling. Without privacy, neither institutions nor individuals want to permanently expose their entire financial trails."

He further pointed out that privacy is equally foundational to security, as attackers cannot steal what they cannot see: "For Solana to achieve a thousand-fold scale, privacy must become a first-class citizen."

What Are Solana Privacy Rings

Solana Privacy Rings are essentially a set of programmable privacy shielded pools, featuring on-chain encrypted balances and direct execution natively on Solana.

The newly launched permissionless default Ring focuses on confidentiality: all asset types and transfer amounts involved on-chain are encrypted, while wallet addresses remain publicly visible. Only the account holder themselves can decrypt and read their own balance using a dedicated viewing key.

Figure: Solana Privacy Rings confidential transfer example. Transaction hash and sender/receiver addresses are visible, but asset categories and amounts remain encrypted on-chain.

The architecture is built around five core features:

· Self-custody security: All transactions must always be initiated and authorized by the asset owner's signature;

· Full asset encryption support: Compatible with native SOL, standard SPL tokens, and Token-2022 extended tokens;

· Native on-chain execution: All privacy transactions are directly verified and settled within the Solana mainnet environment;

· Complete on-chain proof: Encrypted state data is stored directly on the Solana ledger without relying on off-chain black boxes;

· Millisecond-level verification speed: Leveraging succinct zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), on-chain validity checks are completed within milliseconds.

These designs make the interactive experience of on-chain privacy transfers almost identical to regular public transfers. Developers can also intuitively test the results via the Privacy Ring demo tool and Orb browser.

User Fund Flows and Privacy Protection Matrix

In daily use flows, users can deposit assets from a public account into a privacy balance (Deposit), initiate confidential transfers between wallet addresses (Transfer), and withdraw back to a public balance when needed (Withdraw). Some partner service providers will also offer private fiat on/off ramps.

Figure: Illustration of fund flow paths between public balances, fiat on/off ramps, and privacy balances.

Different operational stages correspond to varying encrypted privacy boundaries. In the default permissionless Ring, deposit and withdrawal phases involve interactions with the open ledger where assets and amounts are visible; however, once entering private fiat deposits, privacy transfers, and private withdrawals, both asset categories and exact amounts are cryptographically shielded.

Figure: Comparison matrix of public and encrypted states for sender, receiver, asset type, and amount across different operations in the default Privacy Ring.

Core Application Scenarios for Programmable Privacy

Cat McGee, Head of Technical Privacy at the Solana Foundation, noted: "Developers have built entirely new financial systems leveraging Solana's programmability. As more real capital flows in, privacy must become part of the infrastructure. Solana Privacy Rings allow users to independently decide their confidentiality scope without sacrificing any programmable capability."

The capabilities of Privacy Rings extend far beyond peer-to-peer transfers. By building privacy escrow contracts capable of holding encrypted balances, funds can be automatically released under encrypted conditions upon the fulfillment of preset criteria, thereby supporting four cutting-edge applications:

· Private Swaps: Secretly execute token swaps on-chain according to agreed-upon amounts and pricing;

· Privacy Lending/Borrowing: Lock encrypted collateral in privacy escrow vaults to borrow funds;

· Staking and Yield: Directly utilize privacy balances to participate in staking pools, tokenized US Treasuries, and curated strategy vaults;

· Conditional Payments and DvP Settlement: Trigger releases based on schedules or approval workflows, perfectly suited for enterprise multi-sig payroll, token vesting cliffs, and Delivery vs. Payment.

More importantly, these privacy transactions can be seamlessly composed with other Solana smart contracts within a single atomic transaction, and are able to share liquidity pools with public markets.

Figure: Architecture illustrating a privacy DeFi composite setup that connects on-chain swaps, lending, treasury yield, and Solana staking simultaneously via encrypted privacy balances.

Custom Rings for Institutional Compliance

As more traditional institutions turn their attention to Solana, enterprises universally require dedicated channels that can safeguard trade secrets while meeting audit and regulatory compliance reporting standards. To this end, enterprises can future-deploy Custom Rings to enforce compliance logic directly on-chain.

Ben Brophy, Head of Institutional Growth for Europe at the Solana Foundation, stated: "Privacy must be woven into the infrastructure from the ground up. Institutions must protect sensitive transactions and balances without sacrificing the transparency and accountability required for compliance. Privacy Rings combine configurable compliance with Solana's high-speed performance, perfectly aligning with this need."

Each Custom Ring operates symbiotically with the default permissionless Ring as an independent Solana program, offering four exclusive institutional-grade advantages:

· Configurable privacy levels: Choose a "Confidential Mode" that hides only amounts and assets, or enable a "Fully Anonymous Mode" that conceals both parties' identities and balances;

· Independent Auditor Keys (Auditor Visibility): Configure separate auditor read-only keys to grant specific account balance access to compliance auditors based on preset policies;

· Selective Disclosure: Users can share account statements via viewing keys, or use a single-transaction viewing key to disclose individual transaction logs;

· On-chain customizable compliance controls: Supports direct deployment of address whitelists, blacklists, asset freezes, and additional multi-signature approval rules at the contract level.

As highlighted by U.S. SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins in his public remarks on December 15th last year, zero-knowledge proofs, selective disclosure, and modern wallet architectures enable users to prove compliance without surrendering their complete financial privacy history.

Custom Rings are currently undergoing security audits and are expected to officially launch on the Solana mainnet in Q4 2026.

Figure: Architectural illustration showing cross-ring interoperability between multiple independent Custom Rings, featuring built-in regulatory auditor keys.

Ecosystem Integration and Developer Onboarding

Currently, the permissionless default Solana Privacy Ring has powered several practical products on the mainnet, including Decrypt which enables confidential transfers for funding accounts, Ore integrating privacy protection into mining and staking applications, and Aurora Intents providing cross-chain confidential asset injection.

Regarding compliance monitoring, Range, Chainalysis, and Elliptic Labs have fully supported risk screening flows for related wallets.

Meanwhile, Crossmint, MoonPay, and Paybis are developing private fiat on/off ramps; core ecosystem teams including Backpack, DFlow, Jupiter, Squads, and Titan are also actively advancing integration connectivity.

At the development integration level, Helius has comprehensively abstracted and encapsulated the cumbersome details of zero-knowledge proofs:

· Single RPC Node: Developers can one-stop invoke Solana RPC, indexer, and remote proof generation endpoints through a single Helius URL;

· TypeScript and Rust SDK: Provides out-of-the-box client-side developer packages to easily implement deposits, balance queries, privacy transfers, and withdrawals;

· Dedicated Privacy RPC Methods: Directly retrieve shielded transactions and encrypted outputs via a streamlined privacy RPC interface;

· Custom ZK Toolchain: Partnered with Blueshift to launch the Rust-based XARK toolchain, supporting custom ZK circuit development, and soon launching dual-balance public/private embedded privacy wallets (see more in the official documentation and example code repository).

Security Audits and Subsequent Roadmap

The core programs for Solana Privacy Rings have now been deployed to the Solana mainnet. Their contracts and zero-knowledge proof circuits have sequentially passed audits by three independent security firms: Certora, ZK Security, and OtterSec.

The Trusted Setup for the ZK circuits was collaboratively completed by frontline security engineers from the Solana Foundation, Blueshift, Zcash, Certora, OtterSec, and ZK Security; formal verification for all mainnet programs and circuits is underway and is projected to be fully completed by the end of 2026.

Moving forward, Helius will assist more developers and financial institutions in transforming these foundational privacy primitives into scaled real-world payment and DeFi products. For business inquiries, please contact the team, or follow the official Twitter @HeliusPrivacy and Privacy Telegram group for real-time updates.